Part 7

I read without principle. I have a sort of unity indeed, but it amalgamates instead of selecting--do you understand? When I had read the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi, right through, and was never stopped by the Chaldee--and the Greek poets, and Plato, right through from end to end--I passed as thoroughly through the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas. It is only useful knowledge and the multiplication table I never tried hard at. And now--what now? Is this matter of exultation? Alas, no! Do I boast of my omnivorousness of reading, even apart from the romances? Certainly, no!--never, except in joke. It’s against my theories and ratiocinations, which take upon themselves to assert that we _all_ generally err by _reading too much_, and out of proportion to what we _think_. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much--should have had stronger and better exercised faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation. The fact is, that the _ne plus ultra_ of intellectual indolence is this reading of books. It comes next to what the Americans call “whittling.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT: _Letter to R. H. Horne_, 1843. ‘Letters of E. B. Browning to R. H. Horne.’

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[Sidenote: Her letters.]

Her letters ought to be published. In power, versatility, liveliness, and finesse; in perfect originality of glance, and vigor of grasp at every topic of the hour; in their enthusiastic preferences, prejudices, and inconsistencies, I have never met with any, written by men or by women, more brilliant, spontaneous, and characteristic. This was _her_ form of conversation.

HENRY F. CHORLEY: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’ London: Bentley, 1873.

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Her letters make Cowper’s poor. In a hurried note, whose hurry is evident in the handwriting, she drops ... incidental, but brilliant words--just as if the jewels in her rings, jarred by her rapid fingers, had been suddenly unset and fallen out on the paper.

[Sidenote: Handwriting.]

No other handwriting is like hers; it is strong, legible, singularly un-English (that is, not a slanted or running hand), and more like a man’s than a woman’s.

THEODORE TILTON: _Memorial Preface_ to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’ New York: James Miller, 1862.

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[Sidenote: Characteristic fragments from her letters.]

More of us, you will admit, do harm by groping along the pavement with blind hands for the beggar’s brass coin, than do folly by clutching at the stars from “the misty mountain-top.” And if the would-be star-catchers catch nothing, they keep at least clean fingers.

As to _poetry_, they are all sitting (in mistake), just now, upon Caucasus for Parnassus--and wondering why they don’t see the Muses!

It comes to this. If poetry, under any form, be exhaustible, Nature is; and if Nature be--we are near a blasphemy--I, for one, could not believe in the immortality of the soul.

ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’

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[Sidenote: Her character sketched by a friend.]

I have never seen one more nobly simple, more entirely guiltless of the feminine propensity of talking for effect, more earnest in assertion, more gentle, yet pertinacious in difference, than she was. Like all whose early nurture has chiefly been books, she had a child’s curiosity regarding the life beyond her books, co-existing with opinions accepted as certainties concerning things of which (even with the intuition of genius), she could know little. She was at once forbearing and dogmatic, willing to accept differences, resolute to admit no argument; without any more practical knowledge of social life than a nun might have, when, after long years, she emerged from her cloister and her shroud.

HENRY F. CHORLEY: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’

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[Sidenote: Her religious faith.]

I receive more dogmas, perhaps, than you do. I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ in the intensest sense--that He was God absolutely. But for the rest, I am very unorthodox about the spirit, the flesh, and the devil, and if you would not let me sit by you, a great many churchmen wouldn’t; in fact, churches, all of them, as at present constituted, seem too narrow and low to hold true Christianity in its proximate developments.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: _Letter to Leigh Hunt_. ‘Correspondence of Leigh Hunt,’ edited by his son. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862.

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May I say of myself that I hope there is nobody in the world with a stronger will and aspiration to escape from _sectarianism_ in any sort or sense, when I have eyes to discern it--and that the sectarianism of the National Churches, to which I do not belong, and of the dissenting bodies, to which I do, stand together before me on a pretty just level of detestation? Truth (as far as each thinker can apprehend), apprehended--and love, comprehending--make my idea--my hope of a church. But the Christianity of the world is apt to wander from Christ and the hope of Him.

ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’

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[Sidenote: Her candor.]

You are my friend, I hope, but you do not on that account lose the faculty of judging me, or the right of judging me frankly. I do loathe the whole system of personal compliment, as a consequence of a personal interest, and I beseech you not to suffer yourself _ever_ by any sort of kind impulse from within, or extraneous influence otherwise, to say or modify a word relating to me.... I set more price on your sincerity than on your praise, and consider it more closely connected with the quality called kindness.... Now, mind! your best compliment to me is the truth at all times, without reference to sex or friendship. I excuse the unbonneting.

ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’

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[Sidenote: Her conscientiousness.]

What you say of a “poet’s duty” no one in the world can feel more deeply, in the verity of it, than myself. If I fail ultimately before the public--that is, before the people--for an ephemeral popularity does not appear to me worth trying for--it will not be because I have shrunk from the amount of labor--where labor could do anything. I have _worked_ at poetry; it has not been with me revery, but art. As the physician and lawyer work at their several professions, so have I, and so do I, apply to mine. And this I say, only to put by any charge of carelessness which may rise up to the verge of your lips or thoughts.

ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’

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[Sidenote: Her theories regarding imperfect double rhymes.]

With reference to the double rhyming, it has appeared to me to be employed with far less variety in our _serious_ poetry than our language would admit of genially, and that the various employment of it would add another string to the lyre of our Terpander. It has appeared to me that the single rhymes, as usually employed, are scarcely as various as they might be, but that of the double rhymes the observation is still truer. A great deal of attention--far more than it would take to rhyme with conventional accuracy--have I given to the subject of rhymes, and have determined in cold blood to hazard some experiments. At the same time I should tell you, that scarcely one of the _Pan_ rhymes [occurring in the poem of ‘The Dead Pan’] might not separately be justified _by the analogy of received rhymes_, although they have not themselves been received. Perhaps there is not so irregular a rhyme throughout the poem of _Pan_ as the “fel_low_” and “prunel_la_” of Pope the infallible. I maintain that my “islands” and “silence” is a regular rhyme in comparison.... A reader of Spanish poetry must be aware how soon the ear may be satisfied even by a recurring vowel. I mean to try it. At any rate, there are so few regular double rhymes in the English language that we must either admit some such trial or eschew the double rhymes generally; and I, for one, am very fond of them, and believe them to have a power not yet drawn out to its length, and capable of development, in our lyrical poetry especially.

ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’

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[Sidenote: Browning’s praise of “The Dead Pan.”]

I take the courage and vanity to send to you a note which a poet [Note by R. H. Horne: Robert Browning, then personally unknown to Miss Barrett, although an intimate friend of my own], whom we both admire, wrote to a friend of mine, who lent him the MS. [of ‘The Dead Pan’]. Mark! No opinion was asked about the rhymes,--the satisfaction was altogether impulsive, from within. Send me the note back, and never tell anybody that I showed it to you--it would appear too vain. Also, I have no right to show it. It was sent to me as likely to please me, and pleased me so much and naturally on various accounts, ... that I begged to be allowed to keep it.

ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’

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[Sidenote: “Lady Geraldine.”]

[Sidenote: A pleasing myth.]

Suddenly, one day, as the product of one day’s work, she astonished her friends with the rhapsody of ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.’... This poem had all the faultiness which one might expect of a hundred and three stanzas forced by green-house heat into full bloom in twelve hours; this too by a weak invalid lying on a sofa; but must we spoil the pretty story that the sweet ballad had all the merit of winning for its writer the hand of Robert Browning! Yet the story is only a fiction of the gossip-writers. Nor is it true that the poet with whom she was to mate was then known to her only by his little book of ‘Bells and Pomegranates.’ She had more than a stranger’s reasons for making the wooer of Lady Geraldine speak in this wise:

“At times a modern volume--Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyl, Howitt’s ballad-verse, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie, _Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate,’ which if cut deep down the middle, Showed a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity_.”

THEODORE TILTON: _Memorial Preface_ to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’

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[Sidenote: Surprise of Miss Barrett’s friends at her marriage.]

When I was ill at Tynemouth, a correspondence grew up between the then bed-ridden Elizabeth Barrett and myself; and a very intimate correspondence it became. In one of the later letters, in telling me how much better she was, and how grievously disappointed at being prevented going to Italy, she wrote of going out, of basking in the open sunshine, of doing this and that; “in short,” said she, finally, “there is no saying what foolish thing I may do.” The “foolish thing,” evidently in view in this passage, was marrying Robert Browning, and a truly wise act did the “foolish thing” turn out to be.

HARRIET MARTINEAU: ‘Autobiography.’ Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877.

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It was more like a fairy tale than anything in real life I have ever known, to read, one morning, in the papers, of her marriage with the author of ‘Paracelsus,’ and to learn, in the course of the day, that not only was she married, but that she was absolutely on her way to Italy. The energy and resolution implied were amazing on the part of one who had long, as her own poems tell us, resigned herself to lie down and die.

HENRY F. CHORLEY: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’

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[Sidenote: Hawthorne’s first impression of Mrs. Browning, in 1856.]

She is a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of dark hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face, and a low, agreeable voice. She looks youthful and comely, and is very gentle and lady-like.... She is of that quickly appreciative and responsive order of women, with whom I can talk more freely than with any man; and she has, besides, her own originality, wherewith to help on conversation, though, I should say, not of a loquacious tendency. We ... talked of Miss Bacon; and I developed something of that lady’s theory respecting Shakespeare, greatly to the horror of Mrs. Browning.... On the whole, I like her the better for loving the man Shakespeare with a personal love. We talked, too, of Margaret Fuller, who spent her last night in Italy with the Brownings.... I like her very much.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: ‘Passages from the English Note-Books.’ Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1873.

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[Sidenote: The Brownings in Italy.]

Mrs. Browning is, in many respects, the correlative of her husband. As he is full of manly power, so she is a type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. She has been a great sufferer from ill health, and the marks of pain are stamped upon her person and manner. Her figure is slight, her countenance expressive of genius and sensibility, shaded by a veil of long, brown locks; and her tremulous voice often flutters over her words, like the flame of a dying candle over the wick.

I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire, enclosed in a shell of pearl. Her rare and fine genius needs no setting forth at my hands. She is, also, what is not so generally known, a woman of uncommon, nay, profound learning.... Nor is she more remarkable for genius and learning, than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit. It is a privilege to know such beings, singly and separately, but to see their powers quickened, and their happiness rounded, by the sacred tie of marriage, is a cause for peculiar and lasting gratitude. A union so complete as theirs, in which the mind has nothing to crave nor the heart to sigh for, is cordial to behold and soothing to remember.

GEORGE STILLMAN HILLARD: ‘Six Months in Italy.’ Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1871.

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[Sidenote: “Mignon.”]

She is little, hard-featured, with long, dark ringlets, a pale face, and plaintive voice--something very impressive in her dark eyes and her brow. Her general aspect puts me in mind of Mignon--what Mignon might be in maturity and maternity.

SARA COLERIDGE: _Letter_ in ‘Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge,’ edited by her daughter. New York: Harper & Bros., 1874.

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[Sidenote: “The mother of the beautiful child.”]

It is a pleasant story, told of the street-beggars who walk through Via Maggio, under the windows of Casa Guidi, that they always spoke of the English woman who lived in that house, not by her well-known English name, nor by any softer Italian word, but simply and touchingly as “The mother of the beautiful child.” This was pleasanter to that woman’s ears than to “hear the nations praising her far off.”

THEODORE TILTON: _Memorial Preface_ to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’

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[Sidenote: Bayard Taylor’s description.]

She was slight and fragile in appearance, with a pale, wasted face, shaded by masses of soft, chestnut curls, which fell on her cheeks, and serious eyes of bluish-gray. Her frame seemed to be altogether disproportionate to her soul. This, at least, was the first impression: her personality, frail as it appeared, soon exercised its power, and it seemed a natural thing that she should have written ‘The Cry of the Children’ or ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.’ I also understood how these two poets, so different, both intellectually and physically, should have found their complements in each other. The fortunate balance of their reciprocal qualities makes them an exception to the rule that the inter-marriage of authors is unadvisable.

BAYARD TAYLOR: ‘At Home and Abroad.’ (Second Series.) New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862.

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[Sidenote: Casa Guidi.]

Casa Guidi, which has been immortalized by Mrs. Browning’s genius, will be as dear to the Anglo-Saxon traveller as Milton’s Florentine residence has been heretofore.

Those who have known Casa Guidi as it was, can never forget the square ante-room, with its great picture, and pianoforte, at which the boy Browning passed many an hour; the little dining-room, covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of Tennyson, Carlyle, and Robert Browning; the long room, filled with plaster casts and studies; and dearest of all, the large drawing-room, where _she_ always sat. It opens upon a balcony filled with plants, and looks out upon the old iron-gray church of Santa Felice. There was something about this room that seemed to make it a proper and especial haunt for poets. The dark shadows and subdued light gave it a dreamy look, which was enhanced by the tapestry-covered walls and the old pictures of saints, that looked out sadly from their carved frames of black wood. Large book-cases, constructed of specimens of Florentine carving, selected by Mr. Browning, were brimming over with wise-looking books. Tables were covered with more gaily-bound volumes, the gifts of brother authors. Dante’s grave profile, a cast of Keats’s face and brow, taken after death, a pen-and-ink sketch of Tennyson, the genial face of John Kenyon (Mrs. Browning’s good friend and relative), little paintings of the boy Browning, all attracted the eye in turn, and gave rise to a thousand musings. A quaint mirror, easy-chair, and sofas, and a hundred nothings that always add an indescribable charm, were all massed in this room. But the glory of all, and that which sanctified all, was seated in a low arm-chair, near the door. A small table, strewn with writing-materials, books and newspapers, was always by her side.

---- ----: ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’ _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1861.

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[Sidenote: An evening with the Brownings, 1858.]

We went last evening, at eight o’clock, to see the Brownings; and after some search and enquiry, we found the Casa Guidi, which is a palace in a street not very far from our own. It being dusk, I could not see the exterior.... The street is a narrow one; but on entering the palace we found a spacious staircase and ample accommodations of vestibule and hall, the latter opening on a balcony, where we could hear the chanting of priests in a church close by. Browning told us that this was the first church where an oratorio had ever been performed. He came into the ante-room to greet us, as did his little boy Robert, whom they call Pennini for fondness. The latter cognomen is a diminutive of Apennino, which was bestowed upon him at his first advent into the world because he was so very small, there being a statue in Florence of colossal size called Apennino. I never saw such a boy as this before; so slender, fragile and spirit-like,--not as if he were actually in ill health, but as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood. His face is very pretty and most intelligent, and exceedingly like his mother’s.... Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,--a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet tenuity of voice.

She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable confusion. I could not form any judgment about her age; it may range anywhere within the limits of human life or elfin life. When I met her in London, at Lord Houghton’s breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried drawing-room; and besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender voice she has. It is marvellous to me how so extraordinary, so acute, so sensitive a creature can impress us, as she does, with the certainty of her benevolence. It seems to me there were a million chances to one that she would have been a miracle of acidity and bitterness.

We had some tea and some strawberries, and passed a pleasant evening. There was no very noteworthy conversation; the most interesting topic being that disagreeable and now wearisome one of spiritual communications, as regards which Mrs. Browning is a believer, and her husband an infidel.... Browning and his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Hume, and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning’s head. Browning, however, avowed his belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Hume, who lay extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table. The marvellousness of the fact, as I have read of it, and heard it from other eye-witnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the sharp touch of his logic, while his wife, ever and anon, put in a little gentle word of expostulation.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: ‘Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books.’ Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1872.

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[Sidenote: The color of her hair.]

It curiously happens that I first met Mrs. Browning at Rome in 1859, where and when Hawthorne also first made her acquaintance, I believe. I remember going through the Vatican with him, and the then ex-President Pierce, during my sojourn in Rome, in the spring of that year.

Though we both saw Mrs. Browning last in that year, my impressions are very distinct that her hair was of a dark-chestnut. It did not curl naturally; but, by one of those artifices of the toilet which all of her sex and some of mine understand, it was worn, as it has usually been painted, in side ringlets. Hawthorne’s constitutional propensity to take sombre views of things may account for the liberty he seems to have taken with Mrs. Browning’s hair.

JOHN BIGELOW: _The Critic_, September 23, 1882.

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[Sidenote: Mrs. Browning’s conversation.]